The use of touch-sensitive surfaces as input devices for computers and other electronic computing devices has increased significantly in recent years. Exemplary touch-sensitive surfaces include touch pads and touch screen displays. Such surfaces are widely used to manipulate user interface objects on a display.
Exemplary manipulations include adjusting the layer order of one or more user interface objects (i.e., the z-order or front-to-back order of the user interface objects). Exemplary user interface objects include digital images, video, text, icons, and other graphics. A user may need to perform such manipulations on user interface objects in an operating system graphical user interface (e.g., the user interface for Mac OS X from Apple Inc. of Cupertino, Calif. or the user interface for iOS from Apple Inc. of Cupertino, Calif.), a file management program (e.g., Finder from Apple Inc. of Cupertino, Calif.), an image management application (e.g., Aperture or iPhoto from Apple Inc. of Cupertino, Calif.), a digital content (e.g., videos and music) management application (e.g., iTunes from Apple Inc. of Cupertino, Calif.), a drawing application, a presentation application (e.g., Keynote from Apple Inc. of Cupertino, Calif.), a word processing application (e.g., Pages from Apple Inc. of Cupertino, Calif.), a website creation application (e.g., iWeb from Apple Inc. of Cupertino, Calif.), a disk authoring application (e.g., iDVD from Apple Inc. of Cupertino, Calif.), or a spreadsheet application (e.g., Numbers from Apple Inc. of Cupertino, Calif.).
But existing methods for reordering the front-to-back positions of user interface objects are cumbersome and inefficient. For example, using a sequence of mouse-based inputs to select one or more user interface objects and reorder the selected user interface objects is tedious and creates a significant cognitive burden on a user. In addition, existing methods take longer than necessary, thereby wasting energy. This latter consideration is particularly important in battery-operated devices.